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Delta Air Lines has a well planned and effective enterprise mobile strategy. Delta employs a healthy mix of devices based on the role, environment and required tasks. The employees in the terminals need business mobility devices as rugged as Thor’s Hammer and for everyone else, there are consumer devices. Their business mobility development team is focused on one hybrid platform, which supports their fleet of Android rugged devices and iOS devices.

Are you heavily invested in Big Iron? Do you want to move to mobile but don’t know how? Don’t let Big Iron shackle you to the past. You can move to mobile and it is easier than you think.

There are many short cuts to making the move; such as running emulators/virtual machines on your device, or installing special tools that translate the green screen CICS applications within mobile devices.

But why not leverage your mainframe to do what it is good at, pushing data around!

Are you tired of waiting for your local server to refresh every time you make a change to the client? Does the thought of configuring another developer box make you cringe? Do managers wonder why adding a simple feature takes so long?

A retailer with a complex server page application wanted to convert it to a single page application (SPA). The application consumed inline data from JSP pages and had no service oriented architecture (SOA) in place. Below I will describe our successful approach to converting a legacy server page app into an SPA and the lessons learned from this project.

I’ve spent the last few years consulting at a large enterprise retailer that has traditionally managed IT projects using a waterfall methodology. It made sense—being so large, the company is very silo’d with separate IT departments for different functions and a strong business operations team that constantly gets feedback from the field. A structured requirements and design process with very specific scope was a necessity, as budget was allocated to “projects” at the beginning of each year.

But a few months ago, some of the IT leadership started to push for projects in the new year to be managed with an agile methodology (which included the teams that we were working with). I had a lot of doubts as to whether this would work or not, mainly due to the size of the organization and because only a portion of IT was to use agile.

Some of our team members have had experience with agile in smaller organizations, usually startups, but this is a different beast. As one of my friends often jokes: “Agile is just waterfall without requirements and design.” I thought that’s what it was going to be, but a couple of months in, our progress has exceeded my expectations. Read More

Android applications are built with Java. Gradle is (finally) a mature and well-known build framework. Jenkins is a Java-first Continuous Integration platform and already has fantastic support for Gradle (as well as Maven and Ant) out of the box. So what’s the problem?

Many enterprise leaders today are struggling to make sense of the many options available within the modern web. Very powerful community solutions exist for common problems encountered in modern web development, but the trick is weaving these open source projects together to form a full-stack solution that allows the enterprise to focus on solving business problems.